differenceblog, posts by tag: telephones - LiveJournal

In a study commissioned by the Clorox corporation, Charles Gerba (2007) of the University of Arizona tested surfaces in the workplace for levels of bacteria. The surprising result: women's workspaces were germier than men's. The study looked at phones, keyboards, mice, desk surfaces, and pens, among other surfaces. Of these, men only out-germed women on the desk surfaces. In an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC, 1/21/07), Gerba warns against depending on new "anti-bacterial" office products to cut down on the spread of infection: the products are rarely tested for efficacy. In the same article, Gerba says that hand sanitizers have been "proven to cut absenteeism way down." Indeed, muliple studies (e.g. Hammond et al (2000), White et al, 2001) suggest that hand sanitizers do reduce school absenteeism, but see Meadows and LeSaux (2004) for a critique of these findings. However, CDC guidelines (2002) still recommend the use of alcohol-based handrubs in health care settings.

---

I'm a slob. I eat at my desk. I hardly ever clean it. I don't throw out my coffee cups. I routinely hold pens in my mouth (and I catch myself doing it with other people's pens on a regular basis.) In short, I'm a walking science fair project. However, I still put this study in the category that my partner calls "FUD": fear, uncertainty, and doubt. While I appreciate Gerba's plea for people to stay home when they're sick, I'm highly doubtful that using anti-microbial phone wipes will significantly improve my health.

Last week (1/26/07), we looked at gender differences in musical preferences. The quality of the sound may be a factor as well. McCown et al (1997) found that males displayed a greater preference for "enhanced bass" in music. Interestingly, Mary Ann Clawson (1999) notes that women are overrepresented as bass players in rock bands. Differences in the genders ability to hear certain frequencies may influence this; Jerger et al (1993) found that men (on average) displayed greater hearing loss over 1kHz, whereas women (on average) displayed more hearing loss below 1kHz.

---

When I was a kid, it seemed like every adult in my life had hearing troubles. "You have to speak up to talk to grandma" and "You know I can't hear out of my right ear" were nearly as common statements as the prompting "what do you say?" But one factoid that got trotted out to me over and over again was the idea that adults couldn't hear high sounds as well as kids could, which prompted me to start speaking as low in my register as possible by the time I was eight or nine. This concept is part of the idea behind the "Mosquito" (NYT, 11/29/05), a sound supposedly inaudible to adults but annoying to teenagers, which has been co-opted as a "teacher-proof ringtone" (NPR, 5/26/06). Before anyone else says it: it seems that if women are evolutionarily built for monitoring children, then retaining higher-pitched hearing would be more important for them. However, my suspicion is that this probably has more to do with aging hearing loss versus occupational hearing loss. I would be interested to see results specifically from people who worked in high-noise factories for decades, and see if there's a gender difference there.

Angus Loten reviews an Accenture survery (2006) released earlier this month that shows differences in the ways men and women handle customer service. The online survey of 1,000 people found that women would tend to ask to speak to a manager, while men would rather hang up and call back later. Women were also found to be more likely to complain about having to repeat information or about a CSR's tone or manner.

This finding is not particularly surprising. Lacohee and Anderson's survey (2001) found that women say that they enjoy being on the phone more and that they spend more time on the phone. Lacohee and Andersen also found that women were more proactive and men were more reactive in their interactions with the telephone. Therefore, it should not be surprising that women will complain about having to repeat information to several people when they are staying on the phone to speak to several people. The Accenture reports do not specify whether there was any correlation between asking to speak to a manager and complaining about repeating information, but it seems like a safe bet.

No one likes poor customer service, and there are often cases where switching providers for a particular product or service is not a viable option. An article by Marek Korczynski argues that front line customer service professionals are undergoing constant verbal assault by "abusive" customers. Perhaps a more useful survey would be to test the efficacy of the two approaches: hanging up and trying again vs. talking up the chain of command. Unfortunately, companies that provide customer service can not control which method callers use. Like men on the telephone, they can only react.

As recently as Ono and Zovodny's review of internet surveys in 2001, it was believed that women's involvement in the internet would continue to be less than men's. However, whether this has changed is certainly worth examining. Trends with younger groups seem to be reversing. A 2005 report by Pew/Internet concluded that women under 30 were more involved in the internet than their male peers. The focus on IM, blogs, and Myspace as a form of conversation has harnessed the social insatiability of young women and pulled the internet gender gap closed.

However, these numbers might easily lie. Women may be more likely than men to maintain multiple accounts. Traditional marketing wisdom holds that men are more loyal to a brand -- it's unknown whether this translates to loyalty to a particular website. Finally, there is the question of how many of the "women" in any internet environment are actually women. In the chat rooms of the 1990s, it seemed like 90% of the people on the internet were female, 18, and surprisingly blonde and large-chested.

The really interesting part is how the internet has, in many ways, ceased to be technology. The assumption that women would be less interested in the internet was based on the conceptualization of the internet as a technological phenomenon. However, the internet is no more "technology" at this point than is the telephone. The internet is a social phenomenon. A study by Venkatesh, Morris, and Ackerman (2000) suggests that social factors play a bigger role for women in the adoption of new technologies, whereas men are affected most by their personal attitudes towards new technologies. In other words, gadget-loving men will try out a new technology because it is new, but a woman will use it because her friends do.

Oxygen study finds gender gap all but gone in consumer electronics.

A study commissioned by Oprah's Oxygen network suggests that the gender gap in consumer electronics has dwindled. The study surveyed preferences among 1,400 women and 700 men, and found that women would choose tech gadgets over jewelry or vacations.

This turn of events shouldn't be a surprise. Advertisers have long since realized that the women of America control the family budgets. Coverage of the study suggests that tech is replacing bling in the hearts of female consumers. This is true only in as much as tech is bling. The pink Razr, the pink iPod, the Nintendo "GameGirl" (aka the DS) have all been marketed heavily as female-friendly gadgets. Another factor may be the focus in consumer electronics towards consumer-level connectivity. It's no longer the case that only businesses expect to be connected in real-time. Results from the "Girls Gone Wired" study suggest that women expect to be more active in Instant Messaging, Text Messaging, and digital photo sharing -- the electronic equivalent of going to the bathroom in droves.

Rather than expecting to see more advertising to women electronics consumers (suggesting a mind-numbing level of advertising saturation), I would expect to see the electronics industry re-masculinizing certain products, such as we've already seen with skin care products. The tag line: "this is not your girlfriend's cell phone" is just around the corner.